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3 Tips for Getting More Hot Water At Home

We’ve all been there: you wake up on a cold, winter morning ready to start your day with a nice, hot shower before heading out the door. You step into water that’s the perfect temperature: not too hot, not too cold. As you’re lathering up, thinking about all you have to do today, you’re assaulted by a stream of freezing cold water. The shock is enough to knock you out, but you have to finish rising off before running out of the water. Your day just got ruined, and you haven’t even had breakfast yet.

Now although this is something everyone can relate to, it’s not something any of us enjoy. So to help you never have to experience this again, here are three tips for getting more hot water at home.

Understand Your Water Heater

Regardless of the type of water heater you have, electric or gas-powered, you can run out of hot water if your tank empties. To keep this from happening, the best thing you can do is educate yourself about what your water heater is capable of. According to Laura of BrightNest.com, most hot water heaters only actually givetwo-thirds of their capacity. So if you have a 50-gallon tank, you’ll really only have 33 gallons of hot water, making your shower that takes 2 gallons of water a minute only able to sustain about 17 minutes of hot water.

For this reason, it’s vital to know how big your hot water tank is and how long it will take for it to fill back up again between uses. Laura at Bright Nest also shares that it’s best to wait an hour between uses if your hot water has been completely drained. The reasoning behind this is that a standard 50-gallon tank takes about 20 minutes to refill and then another 20 minutes to heat, making your hour of downtime sufficient to ensure you’ll have a hot shower when you step in the tub.

Insulate Hot Water-Carrying Pipes

If you’re sure you have enough hot water but it’s somehow not making it to your appliances, Roy Berendsohn of Popular Mechanics suggests making sure the pipes that carry your water are well insulated. This can be accomplished either by using traditional fiberglass insulation or specific pipe insulators. Either way, keeping those pipes warm will ensure that the water is still warm by the time it makes it to you.

Troubleshooting Additional Potential Problems

Because water heaters are complicated pieces of equipment, there are quite a few things that could be going wrong and resulting in a lack of enough hot water for your home. But to save yourself some cash by calling in a professional every time your water heater has a hiccup, FamilyHandyman.com recommends trying to troubleshoot the problem yourself first. Common reason for a hot water heater malfunction that you can fix yourself include things like replacing the thermocouple or relighting the pilot light. Trying to assess the problem yourself and then finding a tutorial to help you fix it may be just what is necessary to get your hot water back up and running.

Being saddled with cold showers or baths is something no one enjoys. So to help you to never have to deal with problems like that again, use the tips mentioned above to always have ample amounts of hot water at your house.